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Nostalgia is remembering something past …

• Nostalgia: The pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again. Merriam Webster
• Nostalgia: A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. Oxford Dictionary
• Memory,  The past

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… and wishing to experience it again or return to that time

• The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. Milan Kundera
• A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss. Gustave Flaubert
• Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. Willa Sibert Cather

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Many argue it’s important to think back on happy memories …

• Seek out lovely memories, feelings, or ideas. Hunt for beauty like a child looking for seashells on a bountiful beach. Be open to things outside the frame of “nice” or “pretty.” Let yourself be surprised. Find beauty in unexpected places. Rick Hanson

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… and even to savour them like a good wine

• Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will. Freya Stark
• A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered. C. S. Lewis
• Now that I have opened that bottle of memories they’re pouring out like wine, crimson and bittersweet. Ellen Hopkins

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Thinking back allows you to relive happy moments …

• To be able to look back on one’s life in satisfaction is to live twice. Khalil Gibran
• There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook. David Benioff
• Fish come and go, but it is the memory of afternoons on the stream that endure. Donnall Thomas
• In a person’s lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart. Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
• Sometimes I wanted to take a memory – one perfect memory – curl up in it, and go to sleep. Kiersten White

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… allowing transient moments to endure for a lifetime

• We all have our ‘good old days’ tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in daydreams like cats to favorite armchairs. Brian Carter
• We remember moments, not days We do not remember days; we remember moments. Cesare Pavese
• A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever.
• There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook. David Benioff
• Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. Jean de Boufflers

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Research shows that replaying happy times can contribute to mental well-being and resilience …

• Studies show that those proficient at reminiscing about the past – looking back on happy times, rekindling joy from happy memories – are best able to buffer stress.  Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Replay happy days. The practice of repetitively replaying your happiest life events serves to prolong and reinforce positive emotions and make you happier.  Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Reminisce: Indulge in enjoyable recollection of past events. Oxford Dictionary
• Well-being,  Happiness

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… and can help us look forward

• To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. Margaret

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In limited doses, nostalgia is necessary and can be pleasant and uplifting

• There is a lovely warmness about feelings of nostalgia as though in one’s head one is putting on a pair of comfy old slippers and curling up in front of a fire. William E Geist
• Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if

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However, excessive nostalgia is bad for you

• …And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what you are. You’re just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia. Sherman Alexie
• It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia. Ted Koppel

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Excessive nostalgia brings sadness and pain, not pleasure …

• A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Who wants to live with one foot in hell just for the sake of nostalgia? Our time is forever now!  Alice Childress
• The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. Milan Kundera
• It was nostalgic in that painful way nostalgia could be. Kristen Ashley
• Sadness,  Pain

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… especially when you feel miserable about your present

• …and torture myself with happy thoughts… Terri Guillemets
• You can be sad recalling sad times, but if you really want to be sad, recall happy times. Robert Brault
• There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy. Dante Alighieri
• There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief. Aeschylus
• There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable. Dante Alighieri
• It’s not like I’m all into nostalgia and history, it’s just that I can’t stand the way things are now. Novala Takemoto

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Nostalgia can create an unhealthy attachment to the past

• It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures. Ally Condie
• The past,  Non-attachment

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Nostalgia blinds you to the present and empties your life

• If nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure. R.A. Salvatore
• I have memories – but only a fool stores his past in the future. David Gerrold
• Living in memories is an empty gesture. Rajneesh
• You can only live in the past inside your mind. Augusten Burroughs
• Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead. Lilly Langtry
• Live in the present

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Nostalgia blinds you to the future and to the need to change

• You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time. Charles F. Kettering
• Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear? Jack London
• Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place. Jeanne Moreau

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Nostalgia prevents happiness in the now

• Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness. Andre Gide

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The truth is that nostalgia is a seductive liar

• We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories… Florence King
• Nostalgia is a seductive liar. George Wildman Ball
• Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. Franklin Pierce Adams
• Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Marcel Proust
• Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality. Cyril Connolly

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The mind’s memory loves to magnify the good and eliminate the bad …

• He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
• When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. Margaret Atwood

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… thus creating an idealised version of the past …

• It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. D. James
• There are no days more full than those we go back to. Colum McCann
• The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past. Robertson Davies
• In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. Brooks Atkinson
• Any time gone by was better. Jorge Manrique
• Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. Marilynne Robinson

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… a version of the past that has all the negative aspects photoshopped out

• Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. Doug Larson
• Nostalgia: A device that removes the ruts and potholes from memory lane. Doug Larson
• Nostalgia paints a smile on the stony face of the past. Mason Cooley
• Nostalgia is recalling the fun without reliving the pain.
• Nostalgia is looking back onto a photoshopped version of the past.
• Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed. Brené Brown

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The good old days that we feel so nostalgic for never really existed

• Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was. Will Rogers
• People seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren’t so crazy about the first time around.
• How many people long for that “past, simpler, and better world,” I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them? A. Salvatore
• Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. Franklin Pierce Adams
• A lot of people do that kind of nostalgia stuff believing that they were very happy in their teenage years, but that’s probably just an illusion. Jo Brand

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Through nostalgia’s eyes, even memories of bad times can seem sweet

• Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. Seneca
• Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity. James Thurber
• ..when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. Jane Austen
• How sad and bad and mad it was – but then, how it was sweet. Robert Browning

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Realise that you can never return to the past …

• You can’t return to a place that no longer exists, luv. Samantha Sotto
• That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. E. Housman
• It shocks me how I wish for…what is lost and cannot come back. Sue Monk Kidd
• Letting go

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… and if you could, you’d most likely be in for a crushing disappointment

• It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back.  Bill Vaughn
• How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to relive them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint. Henry Rollins
• Disappointment

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Instead of being nostalgic about the past, be nostalgic about now …

• We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great.  If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.  Art Buchwald
• People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don’t you say the good now days?  Robert M. Young
• Who wants to live with one foot in hell just for the sake of nostalgia? Our time is forever now!  Alice Childress
• When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good. Karl Lagerfeld
• The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Embrace the gift of today

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… and be nostalgic about the future too

• Optimists are nostalgic about the future.
• Optimism,  The future

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Learn to let go of the pull of the past

• The past is for learning from and letting go. You can’t revisit it. It vanishes. Adele Parks
• Let go of the past by becoming fully present
• When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. Now is the key. Eckhart Tolle
• The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. Eckhart Tolle
• You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. Eckhart Tolle
• Renew, release, let go. Yesterday’s gone. There’s nothing you can do to bring it back. You can’t “should’ve” done something. You can only DO something. Renew yourself. Release that attachment. Today is a new day! Steve Marabol
• The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday. Steve Maraboli
• Sooner or later we’ve all got to let go of our past. Dan Brown
• Regret,  Letting go

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Nostalgia and the “good old days”

• The good old times — all times when old are good. Lord Byron
• We all have our ‘good old days’ tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in daydreams like cats to favorite armchairs. Brian Carter
• In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. Brooks Atkinson
• Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. Doug Larson
• The good old days that we feel so nostalgic for never really existed
• People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don’t you say the good now days?  Robert M. Young
• When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good. Karl Lagerfeld
• The good old times — all times when old are good. Lord Byron
• Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. Franklin Pierce Adams
• If you’re yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning. Griff Niblack

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• Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn”t what it used to be? Jasper Fforde
• If you’re yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning. Griff Niblack
• It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Frank Zappa
• It’s hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything.
• It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back. Bill Vaughn
• Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.  Doug Larson
• Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect! Owens Lee Pomeroy
• Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Peter De Vries
• Nostalgia: when you find the present tense and past perfect.

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